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Description

Introduction to Psychology
Lecture 09: Memory
Learning Objective
- Identify ways that memories do and do not accurately reflect experiences
- Explain the function, span, and duration of each of the three memory systems
- Differentiate among the subtypes of long-term memory
- Determine methods for connecting new information to existing knowledge
- Distinguish among ways of measuring memory
- Describe how the relation between encoding and retrieval conditions influences
remembering
- Describe the role of long-term potentiation in memory
- Explain how amnesia helps to clarify the distinction between explicit and implicit memory
- Distinguish different types of amnesia and the relevance of amnesia and the relevance
- of amnesia to the brains organization of memory
- Identify the key impairments of Alzheimers disease
- Identify how childrens memory abilities change with age
- Explain why we fail to remember experiences from early childhood
- Explain how suggestions can shape childrens memories
- Identify factors that influence peoples susceptibility to false memories and memory
errors.
The Paradox of Memory
- The same mechanisms that serve us well most of the time can cause us problems in
others...and surprisingly poor for others.
- Paradox of memory - our memories are surprisingly good in some situations and
surprisingly poor in others.
- Research shows that our memories are astonishingly accurate.
- Memory is surprisingly malleable
- Memory is reconstructive - we extract the gist to make things easier to remember (but
this may contribute to memory errors)
- When remembering, we actively reconstruct memories, not passively reproduce them
- Field Memory (what you saw, more recent memories, more specific, more pure)
- Observer Memory (what an observer would see, more distant memories, more
abstract, more reconstructed)
The Fallibility of Memory
- Increasing evidence indicates that suggestive memory techniques often create
recollections that were never present to begin with.
1. Suggestive memory techniques - procedures that encourage patients to recall
memories that may or may not have taken place
- Memory illusion activity - induce students to misremember hearing (or seeing) the word
sleep, when in fact they didnt hear (or see) the term
1. Memory illusion - a false but subjectively compelling memory, which is likely a by- product of our brains generally adaptive tendency to go beyond the information it
has at its disposal
2. Illustrates representativeness heuristic from Chapter 3like goes with likewe
simplify things to make them easier to remember, which can lead to memory
illusions.
- The Reconstructive Nature of Memory
- Our memories frequently fool us and fail us
- Our memories are far more reconstructive than reproductive
- When we try to recall an event, we actively reconstruct our memories
using cues and information available to us
- We dont passively reproduce our memories
- We should be skeptical of widespread claims (van der Kolk, Britz, Burr,
Sherry, & Hartmann, 1984) that certain vivid memories or even dreams
are exact photocopies of past events
- Evidence that our memories are often reconstructive: an observer
memory is a memory in which we see ourselves as an outside observer
would (Nigro & Neisser, 1983), as compared with a field memory, a
memory in which you instead pictured the scene as you would have seen
it through your own eyes
- Research findings contradict popular opinion
- Surveys indicate that many or most people believe that our memories operate
like video cameras
- About 36% of us believe our brains to contain perfect records of everything weve
ever experienced (Alvarez & Brown, 2002).
- Even most psychotherapists agree that everything we learn is permanently
stored in the mind (Loftus & Loftus, 1980; Yapko, 1994)
The Three Systems Model of Memory
- Most psychologists distinguish among three major systems of memory, described by
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), which seem to be used for different purposes and differ
along at least two dimensions
1.Span - how much information each system can hold
2.Duration - over how long a period of time that system can hold information
- Distinctions among these three memory systems arent always clear-cut, and it is
possible that there are more than three memory systems- Each differs in terms of spam and
duration
- Sensory memory - very brief storage of perceptual information; each sense has
its own form
- Iconic (visual) and echoic (auditory) memories
- Short-term memory - limited duration (< 20 seconds) and capacity (the magic
number = 7 2 pieces of information)
- Includes working memory - information
were actively processing
- Subject to fast decay and inter